NEW YORK (AP) — Television viewers can watch figure skating live during February’s Sochi Olympics, a shift by NBC from past games outside North America.
Every performance will air on cable channel NBCSN during the day, with the key moments shown on tape-delay on NBC that night as in previous Olympics.
So fans can see the women’s gold-medal-winning performance on TV when it happens, instead of waiting until that evening. NBC had started streaming every sport live online at the 2012 Summer Games in London and discovered it didn’t hurt prime-time ratings — and may have even helped. But the network still received some criticism for not airing popular events live on TV.
There is a nine-hour time difference between Sochi and the U.S. Eastern time zone. With the last Winter Olympics in Vancouver, NBC could broadcast figure skating live in prime time.
